Ben Muse

Daniel Libby visits King Island, 1867

Construction of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable pushed the limits of 19th Century technology.  In the 1860s construction was begun on an alternative telegraph line to Europe - across Alaska, under the Bering Strait, and across Russia.

Capt. Daniel B. Libby was in charge of a telegraph construction team that wintered at Port Clarence on the Seward Peninsula in 1867.   Libby was 25 or 26 at the time.  

The Bering Strait. Port Clarence is the embayment to the southeast of the cape (Cape Prince of Wales) on the American side. (Wikipedia)

In March 1925 a roughly dressed man visited the Juneau law offices of  James Wickersham.  The man, Libby's son, needed money to get to Copper River where he understood he could find work as a welder.  He had a packet of papers - his Dad's papers from the Port Clarence days: letters, records, pictures, and a five by seven inch brown notebook with a diary for 1867.  Was Wickersham interested? 

Apparently Wickersham was; the diary was in the Wickersham papers for many years, and is in the Alaska State Historical Library today. 

On June 20 1867, Libby had taken a trip to King Island.  The telegraph construction team that had spent the winter in Port Clarence was beginning to run low on food.  The trip to King Island was evidently part of a larger effort to find food:

King Island, June 1912

William Van Valin was a school teacher at Sinuk, Alaska, during the 1911-'12 and 1912-'13 school years.  Sinuk is on the Bering Sea coast of the Seward Peninsula to the west of Nome, not far from King Island. 

In June 1912, he went walrus hunting in a small powered schooner with a party of Eskimos.  From Sinuk they traveled east to Nome to pick up another passenger, then went west, across the Bering Sea to the Siberian Coast. 

On June 8, they reached King Island and spent two days there.  Van Valin was a sympathetic and careful observer.  He wrote about his visit in his book,  Eskimoland Speaks, published in 1944.  For reasons explained at the end of the post, I' m assuming this trip was in June of 1912 (if I'm wrong it's not by more than plus or minus one year).

As the schooner approached King Island one of the first things he noticed was masses of birds wheeling around the rocks: